£2.84million has been earmarked for this project by HLF subject to the PCF successfully developing the project plans with the assistance of an upfront development grant.

Your Sculpture will follow the success of the PCF’s Your Paintings project, operated in partnership with the BBC. Your Sculpture will improve public access to the UK’s rich and diverse national sculpture collection, whilst providing many opportunities for learning, participation and engagement.

American artist Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) once said, ‘Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting’. This project will give sculpture the recognition it deserves and open it up for greater public enjoyment.

Arguably the finest anywhere, the UK’s public sculpture collection hails from across the world, providing insights into multiple cultures. However, a significant proportion is hidden away and lacks images and online access. Meanwhile, many public monuments are not fully recorded and are at risk.

Your Sculpture will create a comprehensive photographic online catalogue of the UK’s publicly owned sculptures of the last thousand years, held within museums and public buildings and (through partnership with the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association) seen in our outside spaces. The online resource will be free to access. Initial estimates suggest around 85,000 objects from collections and 15,000 outdoor sculptures will appear online. It is envisaged that the project will start in 2016 and take four years to complete.

Your Sculpture will form part of a wider national website encompassing the existing oil painting records, provisionally called Your Art, built by the PCF in collaboration with the BBC and 3,000 art collections across the UK. The current Your Paintings site attracts c.300,000 users per month.

A wide variety of digital and physical engagement opportunities will be offered to audiences during the Your Sculpture project and beyond. The public will be encouraged to share knowledge, exchange opinions, participate in events and go to see the real objects. Opportunities for training and volunteering will support skills development.

Many schools across the UK will have the opportunity to see great sculptures at first hand through ‘Masterpieces in Schools: Sculpture’. This outreach programme will follow on from the PCF’s successful Masterpieces in Schools programme in 2013, when oil paintings by the likes of Gainsborough, Monet and Turner were lent to primary and secondary schools for the day.

There will also be a number of activities to support the museum and heritage sector. The digitisation project will be of considerable value to collections in creating a high-quality online illustrated record of their sculpture holdings. Other benefits will include free high-resolution photographs, access to copyright information, an increase in trained handling support and access to the PCF’s Art Detective network. Importantly, the project will record the condition of sculptures and monuments at risk.

The PCF will deliver Your Sculpture in partnership with four organisations: the BBC, the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association (PMSA), the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) at the Department of Engineering Sciences at the University of Oxford and Culture Street. The VGG will help with the development of image recognition software for a ‘shoot and tell’ mobile App of all sculptures across the UK.  Culture Street will partner the PCF in the production of 50 short films about sculpture, made with young people.

Development funding of £109,700 has been awarded by HLF to the PCF. Together with £5,000 from the PMSA and £7,925 from the Henry Moore Foundation, this award will help the PCF progress its plans to apply for the full grant (the HLF having earmarked £2.84m) towards the end of 2015. During the development period, starting in January 2015, the PCF will also raise matched funding commitments from a variety of funders. A Steering Panel of sculpture experts chaired by Professor David Ekserdjian will guide the project, whilst a community committee made up of members of the public will provide feedback and guidance on engagement activities.

Overall, Your Sculpture will result in large and diverse audiences discovering and enjoying the extraordinary sculptural heritage that belongs to the people of the United Kingdom.

Quotes

Fiona Talbott, HLF Head of Museums, Libraries and Archives
"The UK is privileged to hold such a varied and extensive collection of public sculpture, providing a unique insight into different cultures, eras and styles. HLF is pleased to give initial support for this project to create an easy-to-use resource for anyone interested in learning more about the range of sculpture in historic houses, museums, galleries and open spaces.  We hope that it will also inspire people to go out and discover for themselves the fantastic sculptures that can often be found within their local communities."

Jonty Claypole, BBC Head of Arts
"The BBC is delighted that its long-term partner, the PCF is now extending its remit from oil paintings to sculpture. We look forward to working together with them and bringing sculpture to a wider audience."

Richard Deacon, Sculptor
"This is wonderful news, firstly for the chance for a much wider public seeing an incredibly diverse and rich trove of sculpture from the many different collections involved, secondly for the fantastic tool it will put in the hands of artists, researchers and enthusiasts and thirdly for the huge advances in dealing with three dimensional objects in a digital display that will ensue."

David Ekserdjian, Professor of Art History and Film, University of Leicester and PCF Trustee
"The PCF has proved its capacity to organise large-scale projects of this kind, as demonstrated by the triumphant success of Your Paintings. It is wonderful that sculpture will now be given the same treatment as painting, not least because sculpture is all too often seen as its poor relation."

Andrew Ellis, Director of the PCF
"The PCF team could not be more delighted to have received Heritage Lottery Fund support and to be contemplating the start of this project to reveal the UK’s collection of public sculpture to the world."

Lisa Le Feuvre, Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute
"Sculpture is fundamentally concerned with how we understand our place in the world. Learning more about sculpture enables people to learn more about how we try to make sense of, and perceive, our surroundings. This incredible project will celebrate the richness of sculpture, underlining the importance of the study and appreciation of sculpture inside and outside the realm of art."

John Lewis OBE, Chairman of the PMSA
"The PMSA has long been recording, in detail, outdoor public sculpture in the UK, so that it might be better understood and appreciated. This farsighted grant from the HLF will enable the partnership of the PCF and the PMSA to provide greater access to our sculpture heritage, enabling the public to participate in recording sculpture and contribute to its long-term protection."

Dr Marjorie Trusted FSA, Senior Curator of Sculpture, Victoria and Albert Museum
"Your Sculpture will mean that UK sculpture collections can be catalogued, photographed and made accessible online to people all over the world. Some sculptures which curators have not hitherto had the resources to research will be re-discovered and enjoyed anew. We will thus be empowered to enable literally millions of users to enjoy and better understand these works. I believe Your Sculpture will be one of the most exciting and dynamic sculpture databases ever to be launched."

Notes to editors

About the Public Catalogue Foundation
The PCF is a registered charity. The PCF’s mission is to help public collections make their artworks accessible for enjoyment, learning and research. It was founded by Fred Hohler and launched in 2003 to create a photographic record of all the oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom. It completed this work in 2012. All these paintings can be seen online through the Your Paintings website, created in partnership with the BBC. The website shows 212,000 paintings from some 3,200 collection venues around the UK.

With the help of crowd-sourcing technology pioneered by the Astrophysics Department at the University of Oxford to classify galaxies, and art historical input from the University of Glasgow, the public are invited to go online on the Your Paintings Tagger website and help classify or ‘tag’ the paintings catalogued by the PCF so that the paintings can be searchable by subject matter.

In October 2013, the PCF launched its Masterpieces in Schools programme which involved collections lending paintings by the likes of Gainsborough, Monet and Turner to primary and secondary schools for the day. In May 2014 it launched Art Detective, a digital network that puts collections in search of specialised information about their paintings in touch with providers of specialist information across the world.

In addition to publishing its work online, the PCF has also published a series of 85 printed catalogues that are available for purchase at the PCF website.

Whilst the PCF is principally supported by the private sector, it has received generous support from Arts Council England and the Scottish Government. Its largest supporters include the Monument Trust, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Christie’s and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. This will be its first major grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

About the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association
The PMSA was founded in 1991 by sculpture and monument enthusiast, Jo Darke. As a registered charity it is committed to working to promote, protect and preserve public monuments, sculpture and fountains. It relies on voluntary work, and its projects and publications are funded by membership subscriptions and donations from individuals, institutions and grant-giving bodies.

In 1997 the PMSA set up the National Recording Project (NRP), a survey of British public sculpture ranging from the Eleanor Crosses to contemporary work. Undertaken in collaboration with over 20 British cultural and academic institutions it has received support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Henry Moore Foundation, Pilgrim Trust and the Paul Mellon Centre. The database is a unique collection of over 10,000 entries and can be accessed at the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association website.

In addition to the database, the NRP survey is published in book format as the Public Sculpture of Britain series, in association with Liverpool University Press. Volumes already published include Glasgow, Liverpool, Greater Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, the City of London, Outer South and West London, and Historic Westminster.

The PMSA provides information and consultation on public sculpture and is active in many areas. Its commitment to the promotion of contemporary sculpture is illustrated by the fact it helped set up the Fourth Plinth Project and administers The Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture, and for distinction in restoring historical works, on behalf of the Marsh Christian Trust. The Marsh Award encapsulates the PMSA’s inclusive attitude to public sculpture, which considers historical and contemporary sculpture to be equally important in both rural and urban landscapes.

PMSA runs Save Our Sculpture (SOS), identifying sculpture that has been damaged, vandalised or is at risk and places it on a ‘SOS at Risk Register’. It has spearheaded a campaign to stop sculpture theft and works with the police and organisations from the heritage sector on ARCH (Alliance to Reduce Crime Against Heritage).

The PMSA, in association with Liverpool University Press, also produces the Sculpture Journal, a leading academic journal that has achieved international recognition.

Further information

Public Catalogue Foundation: Laura Marriott on 020 7395 0330 or email: laura.marriott@thepcf.org.uk.